In recent years, smartphones, which are multi-function mobile phones with PDA functionality, have become widespread, and data traffic of individual users continues to increase correspondingly, beginning to cause problems that communication common carriers (carriers) cannot keep up with it by facility enhancement.
Many users subscribe to a fixed communication fee plan commonly called “Unlimited Packet Discount” when they start using smartphones. They can view websites and video sites without worrying about the fee, which results in accelerating the increase of data traffic.
Meanwhile, it is also a fact that there are great differences between individuals in terms of the amount of data traffic, and an exceptionally large amount of use by some heavy users is increasing the overall traffic. Therefore, if the fixed fee is raised as a last resort to cover the cost of facility enhancement, it would cause unfairness among the users.
For this reason, some carriers are beginning to take a measure to suppress the overall data traffic by individually imposing a band limitation on users who have performed extremely large amount of data communication (see Non Patent Literature 1).